I wasn't sure what to tell him. Frankly, 2017 could have been worse. It began with the inauguration of Donald Trump and included several devastating natural disasters. Puerto Rico is still in crisis, and many Texans are still displaced. Still, I think the year felt more bleak than it was for many Americans. Macroeconomic indicators, at least, would suggest that things are all right.

Next year might be tough. Tensions are running high on the Korean Peninsula. The NAFTA talks aren't going well. Mexican drug-trafficking organizations have started producing fentanyl, in addition to smuggling it; that's ominous, because fentanyl is more dangerous than heroin.

And the traffickers themselves are more dangerous than, for example, people who cross the border illegally for other reasons, or those who wish to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity. Our state leaders know that, of course. They also know that Trump wants to terminate NAFTA, for example, and build a wall along America's border with Mexico.

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In other words, Texas is facing risks as a result of Trump's election. Our leaders, thus far, have let us down.

The good news is that - as we saw during Harvey - Texans are good at dealing with things improvisationally, and on our own. The bad news is that we should be prepared to do so. Many of our fellow Americans are grappling with the questions that arose in the wake of Trump's election, in 2016.

The year's top topic other than Trump, according to their analysis, was the Russia investigation.

This is consistent with my experiences over the past year. Since Trump won, Americans have been paying more attention to politics than usual, and at times, I've been reminded of a scene from the 1994 Disney movie "The Lion King" - the one in which Mufasa dies after rescuing Simba from a wildebeest stampede.

At the beginning of the scene, Simba is contentedly playing with a lizard. In the aftermath of Mufasa's death, he runs away, literally and psychologically. For years he socializes only with a warthog and a meerkat who know nothing about his past.

As viewers, we know that Mufasa's brother, Scar, is the murderer. He arranged the stampede, then threw Mufasa off the cliff. But Simba doesn't see those things. At the end of the scene he's frozen in horror, with cartoon shock waves coming out of his head, screaming helplessly into the void as Mufasa falls into the abyss.

Forces of chaos, evil

It's a pretty good allegory for 2016. The wildebeests symbolize the unstoppable forces of chaos and evil that occasionally stampede throughout history. Mufasa represents the norms, laws and institutions that are supposed to protect us from being trampled by them. Scar stands for the Republican leaders who threw Mufasa off a cliff, which they did when they nominated Trump for president.

Many Americans were profoundly shocked when Trump won the election. Over the course of the year, I've had conversations with a number of people who actually seem traumatized, which is why the scene keeps coming to mind; they remind me of Simba, frozen on the cliff.

What's interesting is that these Americans are typically not among the people who were directly affected by Trump's victory, or rendered vulnerable to various risks as a result of it. Those people - Latino Democrats, for example, or anti-Trump conservatives - are comparatively stoic, all things considered. They tend to be focused on the problems at hand, rather than the Russia investigation.

It's been a long year

My sense is that they weren't left reeling by the election. Even if they were expecting Hillary Clinton to win, they were attuned to the possibility she might not. They weren't oblivious to the dangers on the horizon or naive about the people in power.

There's no reason to puzzle over what the Russians were up to, if you think about it. That's Robert Mueller's job. Maybe the Russia investigation will reveal that we somehow deserve a do-over, or didn't really do this to ourselves, but Trump could have won without any help from the Russians. We know that already. We have two major parties, and one of them made him its nominee.

"Long live the king," says Scar, sinking his claws into Mufasa's wrists. If we have an election in 2020, that would be an appropriate theme for the Republican National Convention.

But we can cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, let's just resolve to stop hurling recriminations at each other. It's been a long year, and Trump might make some bad decisions in 2018.